To my intense astonishment they told me that the night before four men had been out on a point of land, from which the bay is visible, cutting some dead harp seals out from a store. The ice had been extraordinarily hard, and it had taken them till seven o’clock at night to cut out twenty-four seals. Just at the very moment before they left for home, my pan of ice had drifted out clear of the island called Hare Island, and one of them, with his keen fisherman’s eyes, had seen something unusual. They at once returned to their village, saying there was a man on a pan, but they had been discredited, for the people there thought it could only be the top of some tree. All the time I had been driving along I knew well that there was one man on the coast who had a good spy-glass, and that he had twelve children, among them some of the hardiest young men on the coast. Many times my thoughts had wandered to him, for his sons are everywhere, hunting seals and everything else. It was his sons, and another man with them, who saw me, and were now with him in the boat. The owner of the spy-glass told me he got up instantly in the middle of tea on hearing the news, and hurried over the cliff to the look-out with his glass. Immediately, dark as it was, he made out that there really was a man out on the ice. Indeed, he saw me wave my hands every now and again towards the shore. By a process of reasoning very easy on so unfrequented a shore, they immediately knew who it was, but tried to argue themselves out of their conviction. They went down at once to try and launch a boat, but found it absolutely impossible. Miles of ice lay between them and me, the heavy sea was hurling great blocks on the land-wash, and night was already falling, with the wind blowing hard on shore. These brave fellows, however, did not sit down idly. The whole village was aroused, messengers dispatched at once along the coast, and look-outs told off to all the favourable points, so that while I considered myself a laughing-stock, waving my flag at those irresponsive cliffs, there were really men’s eyes watching from them all the time. Every soul in the village was on the beach as we neared the shore, and everybody wanted to shake hands when I landed. Even with the grip that one after another gave me, some no longer trying to keep back the tears, I did not find out that my hands were frost-bitten--a fact I have not been slow to appreciate since. A weird sight I must have looked as I stepped ashore--tied up in rags stuffed out with oakum, wrapped in the blood-stained skins of dogs, with no hat, coat, or gloves, and only a short pair of knickers on! It must have seemed to some of them as if the Old Man of the Sea had landed. No time was wasted before a pot of tea was exactly where I wanted it to be, and some hot stew was locating itself where I had intended an hour before that the blood of one of my remaining dogs should have gone.